An Other Place

an other place The Australian War Memorial in a Freirean framework Catherine Anne Styles April 2000 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University Declaration I declare that apart from sourced citations, this thesis is my own original work. Signed, Catherine Styles Acknowledgements Staff at the Memorial were enormously helpful during the course of my research. I had the good fortune to work with Jean McAuslan, Robert Nichols and Anne-Marie Condé as they prepared the Memorial’s new Orientation and Circulation Gallery. Nola Anderson, Linda Ferguson and Mark Whitmore provided me with valuable information on Council, Collection and Evaluation policies and procedures, and Research Centre staff were always happy to assist with my enquiries. Phil Gordon and Peter White at the Australian Museum were excellent correspondents, and I hope some time to learn more about the Australian Museum’s outreach practices. Feedback from Ann Curthoys and Nicholas Thomas helped me identify the nature of my project. Had I better attended to Michael Williams’ observation that “You need to work out what your hamburger is”, the process of producing this thesis might have been shorter. Just when the end seemed farthest away, I met David Hollinsworth. His generosity as a reader and his good cheer inspired me in countless ways. I may never have embarked on graduate studies if my supervisor, Rosanne Kennedy, had been less encouraging, or if I had admired her critical capacities less, and I benefited enormously from the company and critique of a writing group comprised of Rosanne, Catriona Elder and Tikka Wilson. Rebecca Robinson has been a beautiful friend for the duration. Finally, a dedication: to Lyall Gillespie and Wendy Styles, because in a big way it’s for you. Abstract My thesis is that museum exhibitions developed according to Freirean praxis would constitute a better learning opportunity for visitors, facilitate the process of evaluation, and enact the favoured museum principles of dialogic communication and community-building. This project constitutes a cross-fertilisation of adult education, cultural studies and museum practice. In the last few decades, museum professional practice has become increasingly well informed by cultural critique. Many museum institutions have been moved to commit to building communities, but the question of how to do so via exhibition spaces is yet to be squarely addressed by the museum field. In this thesis I produce a detailed evaluation of a museum’s informal learning program; and demonstrate the potential value of adult education theory and practice for enacting museums’ commitment to dialogic communication and community-building. To investigate the value of adult education praxis for museums, I consider the Australian War Memorial’s signifying practice – the site and its exhibitions – as a program for informal learning. I conduct my analysis according to Ira Shor’s (Freirean) method for engaging students in an extraordinary re-experience of an ordinary object. Shor’s program calls for students to investigate the object through three stages of description, diagnosis and reconstruction. Respectively, I testify to my initial experience of the Memorial’s program as a visitor, analyse its signification in national, international and historical contexts, and imagine an alternative means of signifying Australia’s war memory. The resulting account constitutes a record of my learning process and a critical and constructive evaluation of the Memorial as a site for informal learning. It provides a single vision of what the Memorial is, what it means and how it could be reconstructed. But more importantly, my account demonstrates a program for simultaneously learning from the museum and learning about its signifying practice. This dual educational and evaluative method would mutually advantage a museum and its visiting public. In a museum that hosted a dialogic program, the exhibitions would invite evaluative responses that staff are otherwise at pains to generate. Concurrently, visitors would benefit because they would be engaging in a more critical and constructive learning process. In addition, the museum would be enacting the principle of dialogic communication that underpins the project of community-building. Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Introduction: An other place 1 1. The museum as a space for informal learning 10 2. Doing it and accounting for it: Learning at the museum 42 3. In five lessons, the Australian War Memorial: I: Of my experience 62 II: In Australia 87 III: In the world 124 IV: In history 145 V: Of possibility 181 Conclusion or what I have learned 205 Bibliography 213 Appendix: Recent acquisitions by the Memorial 226 Introduction: An other place This thesis was born of a personal frustration with museums, deepened by the strength of my conviction that visiting a museum could be an extremely rewarding experience. With the capacity to shape collective histories, identities and therefore futures, the museum is ‘indeed an agency of extraordinary power and brilliance’ (Preziosi, 1996: 109). But as architect Louis Kahn has complained, most museums are so fatiguing that the first thing you want on entering is a cup of coffee. I agree with cultural critic Ralph Rugoff’s explanation for this effect: ‘so many museum exhibits attract our attention only to immobilise our curiosity. Their atmosphere of infallible authority is paralysing. The deal they offer leaves little room for negotiation’ (Rugoff, 1995: 76). In most museums, there is no question of an equal or playful relationship between the exhibits and visitors. Instead, visitors are positioned as passive recipients of the museum’s knowledge. Whether or not the knowledge is received, the experience is ultimately boring. The formal education process has traditionally worked in a similar way. As the editors of a landmark document on Indigenous culture and museums note, education typically functions to domesticate students, to render them docile, ‘like a lobotomy operation or a relentless lifelong dosage of tranquillisers’ (Edwards, 1980: 28). British educator David Head has expressed the authoritarianism of education even more simply: ‘Education is invasion’ (Head, 1977: 127). Debates on formal education praxis remain within the confines of a paradigm that posits education as a process of information transference. To illustrate this point, I cite a newspaper report on a controversy among Australian historians and teachers as to who and what should be on the list of ‘things everyone should know’.1 Following publication of the bestselling American book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by Professor E.D. Hirsch, the Victorian Government commissioned a group of Australian academics to identify what Australian students should be taught between Years 6 and 10. Proponents of women’s, immigrant and Indigenous history were critical of the proposed syllabus, arguing that it perpetuates a white, male, middle- class view of history. But no one questioned the principle underlying all sides of the controversy – that education is a process of acquiring information. In an alternative educational paradigm, it is more important that students critically analyse the historiographic process, for example, than that they commit a number of significant 1 Carolyn Jones, ‘National treasure hunt’, Australian, 2 February 1996, p.7. Introduction 1 historical moments to memory. Historiography is more important because students who are conscious of the process of writing history are equipped to identify omissions and biases for themselves. In this paradigm, the precise content of the syllabus is irrelevant because the point is to gain a sense of how history is written. This broader perspective rarely rates a mention in debates on the education system. Education can be much more than the acquisition of information. It can be a dialogic exchange that is mutually rewarding for both teachers and learners, or in the case of this thesis, museums and their visitors. The renowned Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, conceived of education in such terms, and his work can be productively applied to, or adapted for, the museum context. In this thesis I use Freirean praxis by adapting a teaching technique of New York educator and Freire collaborator, Ira Shor. Shor’s technique invites students to engage in an extraordinary re-experience of an ordinary object by analysing it in bigger and bigger contexts. Beginning with a close description, students progress by analysing the object in its social, global and historical contexts. As they consider the object in contexts outside their own initial perspective, students become conscious of the limitations of their initial perspective. Equipped with this new consciousness, the students are ready for the final stage in the process, which is to describe alternative possible futures for the object. For my purposes, the object in question is the informal learning program (or signifying practice) of the Australian War Memorial. It is the Memorial’s signifying practices that I describe, diagnose and reconstruct. In doing so I also demonstrate how this kind of method could orchestrate the development of effective dialogic museum exhibitions. In order to explain the notion of ‘dialogue’, and because it is unusual to consider the issue of museum education within a Freirean framework, a brief introduction to Freire and his pedagogical praxis is necessary before I elaborate the project of this thesis. Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, north-east Brazil, one of the country’s poorest regions. From the late 1940s until 1964 he worked extensively to promote self- determination among illiterate peasants, developing an educational praxis that was to become internationally celebrated. Imprisoned by the military for 70 days, and exiled for 16 years, he went on to work in Chile for UNESCO; at Harvard University’s Center for Studies in Development and Social Change; and in Geneva for the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches. He developed literacy programs for Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Peru and Nicaragua.

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